Thursday, August 1, 2013

Have you ever had the dream where you're trying to outrun something --a train, a car, or Usain Bolt-- but you feel like your feet are made of lead? You're trying desperately to get around a corner before you get run over, and you can feel the rumble of the steam engine in your bones as that train gets closer....

Closer....

Closer....

And then you wake up, your heart pounding in your chest.

Yeah, I've had that dream a lot recently, and it involves Deepwind Gorge.

On the face of it, Deepwind Gorge is a lot like Arathi Basin and Battle of Gilneas, with the additional part of having to capture the other faction's gold. The BG is more compact than either AB (by a lot) or BoG (marginally so), but the line of sight issues make it seem larger than it is. But the biggest differences between the prior two and DG are the locations of the respawning points: each faction's home base.

That alone changes the dynamics of the BG, because if you're assaulting a mine and you can kill off another faction's toon, that pretty much guarantees that toon will be gone for more than twice the normal amount of time it would take to run back from a localized spawning point. We've all been in the situation where you're in AB assaulting the Gold Mine, and you kill off a toon just to see it make a reappearance from the GM spawning point 10 seconds later. That won't happen in DG.

But what the respawn points also do is make Rogues' biggest advantage --stealth-- their biggest weakness.

No matter how fast a Rogue can run while stealthed, except for a few short bursts they can't move fast enough to get back to a base in peril. You are trying to get back as quickly as you can, or to get anywhere as quickly as you can, and you feel like your feet are in mud.

There is an option, of course, which is to summon your mount and ride back, but for a class that's bringing up the bottom in terms of survivability in BGs, that's akin to jumping up and down and yelling "Free HKs!!" To ensure survivability you have to ride in a pack, and that isn't playing to a Rogue's strength either.

Rogues are at their best when they can strike when you least expect it. They don't have the plate (or even the mail) of other melee classes, and they don't have either tanking or healing capabilities. They also don't have a (seemingly) neverending font of mana, either.*

What all this means is that a Rogue's best bet while playing Deepwind Gorge is to either play close to your home base --defending the gold-- or spending time as part of a bigger effort. Solo work is a risky business for a Rogue in general, and solo work in DG is potentially very nasty indeed.

Oh, and try not to have too many nightmares.

*I once hid in Icewing Bunker with another Rogue, watching a Mage spam Arcane Explosion and seeing the Mage's supply of mana creep downward like a snail. "They need to nerf that," I whispered. "There's absolutely no downside to spamming that for minutes at a time."

"Yeah," the other Rogue replied. "That and a Lock's Hellfire and Rain of Fire. When a Lock can dump Rain of Fire on the run...."